Recently, there has been a turn away from textualist and
culturalist theory in feminism and the emergence of "new" materialist
feminisms. Represented by the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti,
and others, this turn in theory has come in response to the deepening
inequalities and crises of capitalism that are havingprofound effects on women worldwide — material problems outside
the text and not resolvable by a change in cultural values. While it is
important to see that the new materialist feminisms are responses to
real problems, it is equally important to understand how these
materialisms are limited by their conceptualization of the material.The new materialist feminisms are actually disenabling for
feminism in that they are forms of spiritualism which displace critique
with strategies of enchanted affective adaptation and survival and thus
dismantle materialist feminism's primary conceptual tool for social
transformation.To avoid
merely reproducing sophisticated forms of the survivalism and
"prepperism" that have emerged as individualistic coping responses to
economic crisis and austerity, I argue that feminism needs to return to
historical materialism in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Kollontai to
understand social life in terms of its root relations and aid in the
struggles to bring about social transformation.

Exemplary of the new materialist feminism is Rosi
Braidotti's writing on "the politics of 'life itself'," a theory which
she organizes around the trope of "sustainability." Sustainability, a
concept in ecology for living within natural limits, becomes in these
writings a means of reconceiving the historical social relations of
capitalism as if they were the unchangeable, underlying existential
limit-situation of "life itself." The politics of "life itself" and the
new materialist focus on seeking a sustainable feminism within this new,
more "realist" approach to
material reality, is a form of feminist theory and politics which is
ultimately the already familiar theory and politics of reparative
reading. Why is this significant? As Ellis Hanson suggests in a review
of Sedgwick, "Faced with the depressing realization that people are
fragile and the world hostile, a reparative reading focuses not on the
exposure of political outrages that we already know but rather on the
process of reconstructing a sustainable life in their wake" (105). In
other words, reparative analysis begins not with critique of the
so-called already known and presumably known to be unchangeable, but by
focusing on how to live within the already-known-to-be hostile world.
Such a theory of the social begins and ends by reducing knowledge to a
matter of how to cope, how to feel, how to exist, etc. within what is
taken to be unchangeable. The effect of this focus on "sustainability"
within hostility is that social transformation — which requires the
production of knowledge of what needs to be transformed — is treated as
impossible. Abandoning the project of transformation, I argue, is a sign
of the way dominant "materialist" feminism — under the guise of "new
materialism"— has increasingly abandoned the project of women's
emancipation from exploitation, and in the interests of capital instead
translates austerity measures into a theoretical discourse of getting by
on less.

At the core of Braidotti's theory of "sustainable
feminism" and "life politics" is a "new materialist" understanding of
"life." For Braidotti, life is made up of two parts — zoē and bios.
Zoē, "life as absolute vitality," is the spiritual and bios
is the "bio-organic" body which sets limits on the spiritual life force
(210). Braidotti writes:

Zoē, or life as absolute vitality, however, is not
above negativity, and it can hurt. It is always too much for the
specific slab of enfleshed existence that single subjects actualize. It
is a constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the
wave of life's intensities and ride it (210).

Thus for Braidotti, the source of social contradictions
is the conflict between zoē, that is, absolute vitality or spiritual
life force, and our bio-organic bodies. As a result, Braidotti's new
materialism bypasses the ensemble of social relations and historical
conditions that produce social contradictions in capitalism and presents
contradictions as transhistorical and existential conditions of life as
such. On this logic, our absolute vitality comes into the world and
reaches the limit of the body and this causes us "pain." But (in this
narrative) there is no real way to compensate for pain. This explanation
of pain is an example of bypassing the social. As such it is an
accomodationist block to changing the conditions that produce suffering.

In fact, as with all the popular articulations of
"materialism" today, Braidotti's theory is not actually an extension of
materialism, but a break from it. Materialism means determination by the
mode of production because it is this materialism that explains sense
experience. Materialism is not the experience that exceeds conceptuality
— a Kantian theory of the material that has come to dominate cultural
theory, especially as it conceives of "life." This notion of materialism
merely reifies sense experience, it cannot explain it. Braidotti is
Kantian about the material because she sees it as a sublime excess.
Life, Braidotti writes,

is experienced as inhuman because it is all too human,
obscene because it lives on mindlessly. Are we not baffled by this
scandal, this wonder, this zoē, that is to say, by an idea of life that
exuberantly exceeds bios and supremely ignores logos? Are we not in awe
of this piece of flesh called our 'body,' of this aching meat called our
'self' expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life?
(208).

According to Braidotti, what exceeds the individual body
is zoē—the spiritual life force, which we should not understand
conceptually (by seeking to explain the conditions that shape it) but
worship. This is a sentimental anti-instrumental call for the
re-enchantment of life that obscures the way the individual is
determined not by what Braidotti calls "divine potency" but by the
social relations of production. And like all anti-instrumental
arguments, Braidoitti's ends up affirming a species of the sublime: a
mode of affective non-knowing that resists rationality.

Thus, having rejected the necessity of being able to
conceptualize (visible) effects to their (often invisible) causes,
Braidotti proceeds to declare that the effects of living in the ruins of
capitalism—especially disasters like 9/11—defy all reason and are
impossible to understand, and she concludes that what is now necessary
is not collective praxis to address the social relations which condition
the unequal situations of tragedy, but an individual ethics of
affirmation.She writes:

This is the road to an ethics of affirmation, which
respects the pain but suspends the quest for both claims and
compensation. The displacement of the "zoē"-indexed reaction
reveals the fundamental meaninglessness of the hurt, the injustice, or
injury one has suffered. "Why me?" is the refrain most commonly heard in
situations of extreme distress. The answer is plain: actually, for no
reason at all. Why did some go to work in the World Trade Center on 9/11
while others missed the train? Reason has nothing to do with it.
That's precisely the point. We need to delink pain from the quest for
meaning. (213-14)

Following her predictable rejection of concepts and
reason, in the guise of a sermon on "selflessness," Braidotti here once
again rejects the abstract in favor of the errant concrete and takes as
a presupposition the individual. For it is of course from the starting
point of individuals and their loss that we cannot understand and
explain such historical events as 9/11. From the perspective of the
individual, such events are indeed random and inexplicable, but from a
historical perspective they are determined. It was deep global
inequities that provided the conditions of possibility for the 9/11
attacks. To celebrate the individual perspective and the inability to
grasp historical necessity based on that individual perspective is not
only to celebrate ignorance, but to naturalize the limits of workers and
how they are thrust into the position of individuals who must compete on
the market for work while leaving it the prerogative of the owners to
organize the totality to the benefit of a few at the expense of the
many.

Central to Braidotti's enchanted materialism is her
claim that affectivity "is what activates an embodied subject,
empowering him or her to interact with others" (210). However, she
writes, "a subject can think/understand/do/become no more than what he
or she can take or sustain within his or her embodied, spatiotemporal
coordinates" (210). Thus, the ethical subject is the one who learns to
endure his or her maximum zoē/bios intensity because
such endurance leads to "sustainable transformations" (211), the degree
of change an individual can bear.

But the consequences of affirmative ethics are deeply
problematic when considered in relation to the material conditions of
working class families, who have been subject to a thirty year
stagnation in real wages, even as worker productivity has sharply
increased. In the wake of the more recent 2007 crisis, worker
productivity has sharply increased [1], while wages fell. Alongside of
these trends, rates of violence against women have increased
dramatically [2] and suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in
the US [3].That the spouses in
working class families are increasingly emotionally strained and often
alienated from one another is not a transhistorical effect of their
embodied state as it confronts a "divine" life force in
zoē,
but an effect of their deepening exploitation. To posit their connection
and dis-connection as a transhistorical effect of the confrontation with
bios-zoē is to de-historicize their pain and alienation as
individuals and as a couple. It is to cut off affect from its social
conditions and then insist on its affirmation.

Working more hours is a matter of "making do," not
existential intensity, and it is this making do under conditions of
deepening exploitation that all working class families—gay and straight,
white and of color, native and international—have been forced to do and
which affects women profoundly.As
Marx explains in his analysis of the global development of capitalism

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in
manual labour... the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is
the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age
and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working
class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex. (Communist Manifesto 62).

This is a particularly important argument because it
explains the way that capitalism increasingly turns women into
wage-workers.Working class
women and men form the "great camp" facing capital and it is thus
increasing important to the prospects for revolution that women conceive
of themselves as working class. This is daily confirmed in the era of
global capitalism, when women workers make up the increasing majority of
global workers, subject to extremely low wages and are particularly
susceptible to the effects of austerity because they tend to work in and
use the public sector more than men.

As my discussion has, thus far, implied, "new
materialism" is a ruling class movement in cultural theory in
general and in feminist theory in particular. "New materialism" is aimed
not only at ideologically and pragmatically adjusting exploited workers
to the exigencies of capitalism in crisis and marginalizing struggles
for social transformation by representing them as outside the realm of
the "sustainable" (as we see in Braidotti's theory of "new
materialism"), but it also serves as a means to shore up the class
privileges of a small ruling class minority of men and women in
capitalism by translating class contradictions into a new metaphysics of
freedom.

This is evident in the "new materialist feminism" of
Elizabeth Grosz who, in her essay "Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,"
calls for a turn in feminism to understanding freedom for women in
"metaphysical terms" (140) and, more specifically, in terms of the
autonomism of Nietzsche and the "vitalist" metaphysics of Henri Bergson.Grosz argues that feminism and its (so called) "traditional"
concepts of materialism, have been focused on a "negative" concept of
freedom—what she calls a "freedom from"—by which she means
freedom from external material relations outside the subject in which
constraints are imposed by "the (oppressive and dominant) other" (141).
Drawing on Nietzsche, Grosz characterizes struggles for "freedom
from," as part of "the other-directedness of [a] reactive herd
morality" (141) which assumes that "freedom is not an accomplishment granted by the
grace or good will of the other" (152). According to this narrative,
"freedom from," therefore, only works "within existing social networks
and relations" rather than "the creation of a future unlike the present"
(154). While Grosz does not outright deny that constraints imposed by
others still exist, she contends that "'freedom from,'... at best...
addresses and attempts to redress wrongs of the past without
providing any positive direction for action in the future" (141,
emphasis added).

Instead, Grosz argues that "we need to look outside the
traditions of thought that have considered subjectivity as the realm of
agency and freedom only through...the operation of forces—social,
cultural, identificatory—outside the subject" (140). Feminism, she
contends, should take up a "freedom to" which is "unconcerned with
the other and its constraints, directed only to its own powers and
to the fullest affirmation of its own forces" (141, emphasis added).
"Freedom to," she claims, is a "positive" concept of freedom—a
sign not of "herd morality" but of "the self-affirmation of an active or
noble morality"—because it is not "bound up with a shared existence with
the other and the other's powers over the subject" (141) and does not
seek freedoms "bestowed on us by others," rather, it relies on
"autonomy, in the individual’s inner cohesion and
historical continuity" (153).

Grosz's relegation of "freedom from" to an ignoble "herd
morality" and the problems of the past is a ruling class caricature of
collective struggles for social transformation that marginalizes the
continued need for freedom from necessity brought on by the deepening of
exploitation in transnational capitalism.The unsaid logic of the argument that collective struggles to
realize freedom from necessity display a shameful lack of autonomy is
the same ruling class moralism which asserts that the workers are
seeking special favors and handouts from those in power instead of
relying on their own "inner" resources and innovations. We can see the
class politics of this theory when Grosz poses the rhetorical question:
"Is feminist theory best served through its traditional focus on women's
attainment of a freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonialist, heteronormative constraint? Or by exploring what the female—or
feminist—subject is and is capable of making and doing?" (141).The underlying logic and unsaid assumption of Grosz' argument is
that feminism no longer needs to concern itself with the emancipation of
women from material relations and the social structures that oppress and
exploit them in transnational capitalism. Contrary to Grosz's claims to
supersede liberal feminism, her argument is not rooted in materialist or
transformative feminism, rather, it is based on a ruling class
postfeminism that assumes that women have already achieved
"equality" and "power" and that struggles for collective social
transformation of our "shared existence" are no longer relevant or
necessary to bring about freedom for women.

This is a disenabling view for an emancipatory
materialist feminism because it conceals the fact that despite the
changes in women's lives that have come with being pulled en mass into
the workforces of global capitalism, these changes have been class
divided: while a small class fraction of women in global capitalism now,
alongside of ruling class men, own a greater share of the wealth
produced by the surplus-labor of the global working class and occupy
positions of power, for the majority of women this has meant what
Goretti Horgan calls "equality in exploitation" and the "race to the
bottom upon which global capitalism is founded" (n. pag.).

Grosz, however, raises the historical and socially
produced class contradictions in postfeminism to a new level of
ahistorical abstraction by translating them into a new metaphysics of
freedom."Freedom," Grosz
argues, is "an immanent and sometimes latent capacity in life" (149).
"Life itself," and therefore "freedom," according to Grosz, is best
explained as ontologically "indeterminate"—a radical form of
contingency that "liberates life from the constraints of the present"
(153). She argues that, "Indetermination is the ‘true principle' of
life, the condition for the open-ended action of living beings, the ways
in which living bodies are mobilized for action that cannot be specified
in advance" (149) and that "the possible never prefigures the real, it simply
accompanies it as its post facto shadow" (147). "[E]ven in the most
extreme cases of slavery," she contends, "there is always a small space
for innovation [and...] inventiveness" (n 1; 154). Freedom, in Grosz's
narrative is a spontaneous and inalienable condition of life itself or
the sheer fact of living—an élan vital or spirit of
life—such that even the slave has "freedom" within slavery, thus making
the freedom from slavery unnecessary.

Grosz's "freedom to" or "within" which occults the
conditions that necessitate freedom is a vacuous and empty concept of
freedom that provides an apologetics for wage-slavery (and the growth of
human trafficking) in capitalism. It puts in ideological suspension the
historical and material conditions of necessity and exploitation which
determine the ends and interests toward which "life" is put in
capitalism by representing them as not only impossible but unnecessary
to understand. In doing so, this theory is a most effective ally of
capital because it rejects the possibility and necessity for collective
social transformation, planning, and organization. Without
transformation of production relations, the "innovation" and
"creativity" of the exploited—the capacity of the worker to produce—is
still subordinated to production for the profit of some not the needs of
all. Rather than becoming the basis of freedom for all, workers
surplus-labor enriches the owner's profit and conditions of life while
workers are reduced to the sheer fact of biological living. Grosz merely
translates this process of alienation through exploitation into
metaphysical terms and celebrates it as freedom.

Freedom is not an imaginary ontological autonomy but, as
Engels argues, it is "a product of historical development" (Anti-Dühring
144). Women and others can be free only insofar as they are free from
necessity. Freedom from necessity is founded not on ontological autonomy
but on social collectivity, which is a material relation of
production in which no one person can privately own the means of
production and, therefore, command over the surplus-labor—and thus the
lives—of others; "a state of society in which there are no longer class
distinctions or anxiety over subsistence for the individual, and in
which for the first time there can be talk of real... freedom" (145).

Grosz is more concerned with the freedom of some from
"definitions" rather than the freedom of all from exploitation.
She writes: "Freedom has no given content; it cannot be defined"
(147) and explains
this theory with the following statement from Bergson: "Any positive
definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism" (quoted in
Grosz 147). However, Grosz does not actually leave freedom without a
content—and, specifically, a class content. She writes:
"Freedom is thus the exception rather than the rule in the sense that it
can function only through the ‘autonomy' of the living being against a
background of routinized or habituated activity" (148). In other words,
freedom is a matter of the "exceptional" living being who acts in
unconventional ways. Yet, this "freedom" requires the continuation
of "a background of routinized or habituated activity" that the so
called "exception" can be offset against. For the majority of women this
means the normalization of their routine and habitual exploitation by
capital which Grosz dehistoricizes by abstracting it from the material
relations of production that enable it. Put another way, Grosz's theory
ideologically normalizes and "disappears" the material exploitation of
women's surplus-labor in transnational capitalism by ideologically
"dissolving" it into a question of their "habituated activity." Grosz's
"exceptionalism" puts into sharp relief the class interests behind her
argument for a feminism that is "unconcerned with the other and its
constraints" and that rejects "a shared existence with the other"
(141). This is not a theory of the autonomy of the feminist subject from
the "(oppressive or dominant) other" (139, emphasis
added) as Grosz claims.
Rather, it is a theory for a ruling class feminism which is aimed at
dispensing with the collective needs of the exploited others in
capitalism for freedom from necessity through collective social
transformation. This is the mark of a turn to a capitalist class theory
because capitalists benefit when we concern ourselves only with
ourselves. When we do this (focus on the individual), we make ourselves
as well as others easier targets for exploitation.

Despite its disclaimers, new materialism ideologically
updates liberal feminism, and this not only leads it to reject
conceptuality as the erasure of the random, the unpredictable, and the
indeterminate, but to affirm the bourgeois theory of individual liberty,
which underwrites new materialism's notions of affirmative ethics and
autonomous freedom. Liberty, as Marx argues in "On the Jewish Question,"is "[t]he right of the circumscribed individual,
withdrawn into himself" (Reader 42). Individual liberty takes for
granted a world in which individuals are divided by class: on the one
hand there is the class of workers who are forced to compete with one
another on the market for "jobs" in order to gain a livelihood and
survive. On the other, there are the capitalists who buy the labor of
workers on the market and profit from the use of that labor in
production. What Marx calls the individual withdrawn into himself is
thus the cultural effect of economic relations that make possible the
individual who puts her own private need above collective need, and who
thus accepts a world in which the have-nots struggle as individuals,
increasingly alienated, in order to make ends meet. This is of course
the individual whose liberty to remain an unregulated individual—to
put the private before the collective—is lauded by the bourgeois, who
take this right as a transhistorical, indeed natural phenomenon.As Marx puts it, the "practical application of the right of
liberty is the right of private property" (42). Through the lens of
individual liberty, capitalists' deepening of the rate of exploitation
of workers may be criticized for being "too high" at times, when the
class divide threatens to destabilize capitalism, but the ability of
capitalists to exploit their workers is never questioned. Hence the
emphasis, not on the need for transformation, but on the "selfless" and
"noble" accommodation to worsening exploitation—a mantra that is
everywhere repeated whenever working class movements demand better wages
or working conditions.

A "materialism" that does not account for the historical
relation of "life" in general or the conditions of women's lives in
particular to the ensemble of the social relations of production—that
is to class relations and exploitation in production—is not
materialism but a new spiritualism that ideologically covers over the
social structures and historical basis of inequality and economic
contradictions in capitalism, and presents these as existential
conditions of life as such.
What Alexandra Kollontai said of feminists of the 20th century is still
true today of new materialist feminists, including Grosz and Braidotti.
She writes:

However apparently radical the demands of the
[bourgeois] feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that [they]
cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental
transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of
society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete. (176).

It is time to give up liberal, bourgeois theories,
including new materialist feminism and take uphistorical materialist feminism for the 21st century.

Economic Policy Institute. "The benefits of increased productivity
over the last thirty years have not gone to the middle class."
State of Working America.
Economic Policy Institute. n.d. Web. 31 Dec. 2012.